Every time I sit down to play with Garage Band to record something that I am practising, I end up recording like 12 tracks (rhythm, lead, voice, drums, bass, keyboards).
For example, yesterday: http://www.raggedclown.com/2009/12/24/little-red-rooster/
Does everyone do that? Or is it just me?
Sounds about right, sometimes when i record i do 5 or 6 tracks just for drums.
I can’t seem to play a blast beat on double bass for as long as i want, so i record like 10 seconds of that and just loop it.
Sometimes i will also do multiple vocal tracks just to add depth.
Sometimes i record the room i record in just to add a little ambient, like in a live recording.
Its all about what kind of sound you want!
When i was in audio/visual school, sometimes i would see a fellow audio student working with software that had 40 tracks. I really doubt it was garage band, but some software along those lines.
I think Garage Band has one major weakness which is that (at least as far as I can tell) you can’t have multiple loops within one track, so if I have two different loops for one instrument, even if I don’t need them to go at the same time, I have to make separate tracks! That gets them piling up quite fast. It’s also annoying that I can’t record over one track and keep the previous recording intact, so more tracks stack up for that reason, because I want polyphony.
Ah - I didn’t think of that…back to the recording studio!